ClimateWire headlines — Monday, November 4, 2013 — 7:53 AM

SPOTLIGHT

Bob Dixson knows something about disasters. He was elected mayor of Greensburg, Kan., after a massive EF-5 tornado spun through the town of 777 people like an out-of-control blender. Six years later, the crossroads community has rebuilt itself to be more resilient and less dependent on things like the electricity grid. Now, as a member of the president's new State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, Dixson plans to pass his experiences on to the Obama administration.

In late September, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest science summary, IPCC scientists highlighted the certainty of human's role in recent climate change. To an observer of the news conference in Stockholm following this release, though, few of those points would have been clear. That's because during the conference, journalists posed question after question on what they seemed to see as a key uncertainty in climate research: the 15-year pause in surface temperature warming.